Thinking about it as he wound his way around the bends of the bayou to the river, Keith figured things had to be really bad in Florida for Bart Branson to come all the way here by boat. The last time they’d discussed it, his old man had insisted that he was better off than most everybody down there, with his secluded little hideaway on the Caloosahatchee, but he was concerned about his granddaughter and her mother. There had been major riots just south of them in West Palm Beach, and it was even worse in Miami. Keith hated to think about Megan and Shauna being stranded there, but there was little he could do about it, considering the distance. Taking care of them was Eric’s job, but his brother made other choices long ago, and Keith couldn’t really blame Shauna for divorcing him and moving on. She was doing what she had to do to take care of herself and Megan. He just hoped they were both okay after all this.
If he had been able to get through to his father after the surprise radio call today, he would have bombarded him with all his questions: Did he get Shauna and Megan out? Were they with him now? Had anyone heard from Eric? What about Shauna’s new husband, was he with them too? The answers would have to wait though, because so far, there was nothing to indicate that Bart had received his reply. Keith was too impatient to sit there doing nothing though, and that’s why he was headed for the river now. Maybe Bart was anchored somewhere nearby, unsure of how to find Keith’s property by water, as he’d only been fishing with him there once years prior. Keith would check the stretch of river nearest the bayou, and if he didn’t see him there, he would run up to his brother-in-law’s place on the old river channel north of the interstate and try his radio. Vic Guidry had a much taller antenna on his fishing trawler, and could certainly transmit farther than Keith could. It would be preferable to make radio contact with his father first rather than spend time running miles up and down the river looking for him without even knowing what kind of vessel he was aboard and whether or not he was in the old river or the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel.
Keith suspected he might be aboard one of the larger motor yachts from his boatyard. Maybe he had a customer there who was based somewhere in Louisiana or Texas, and he’d caught a ride here. Or he could have arranged to come on a commercial work or freight vessel. It was even possible that he wasn’t aboard a boat at all, but instead had called from one of the roads nearby, despite the fact that he’d used the VHF. In normal times it was illegal to use that frequency band for anything other than marine communications, but Bart wouldn’t care about that now, and he would have certainly had access to many such radios in the boatyard he could have brought with him, including handheld units.
Keith called again as he neared the river, hoping he was getting closer and that he might get through, but there was still no reply, and when he reached the broad expanse of the Atchafalaya, he saw nothing moving either upstream or downstream as far as he could see to the next bends. He motored out to the middle of the channel and killed the engines, sitting there adrift in the lazy current as he tried the radio again:
“Vessel calling St. Martin Parish S.O., this is Deputy Branson, St. Martin Parish S.O… I repeat, this is Deputy Keith Branson, St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department. Do you read me, Dad?”
Keith waited and tried again several more times before starting the outboards again and speeding downriver to the next bend to have a look. There was nothing in sight there either, and his calls went unanswered, so he turned the boat around to run up to the north and try the radio on Vic’s boat. He had just reached his brother-in-law’s dock when his other radio came to life, this one the Motorola two-way unit that operated on a restricted band used by the sheriff’s department. It was an urgent call from Greg Hebert, the only other deputy in this north end of the parish and he was calling from nearby Henderson.
“I need to borrow your truck,” Keith said; when Vic came down to ask what was going on after seeing him tying up his boat. Keith grabbed his rifle and the bag with his magazines as he explained. “Greg just called and said there was a shootout in Henderson; looters that wandered in off I-10, from what I gathered. They’re pinned down in the convenience store next to A.J.’s Cafe, and he needs backup!”
“I’ll drive you, let’s go!”
“Better grab a rifle or shotgun then. You never know with these things!”
Keith sat on the passenger’s seat of the pickup with his rifle in hand as he reflected back on all the times he’d responded to such calls since the madness began. It was unlikely that today’s incident would be of much significance, because the hurricane had left so much of the area in ruins there was little left to steal and fewer people left to fight over it. Keith wasn’t worried, because no matter what he encountered, nothing could top what had already happened. He would engage these thugs like all the others, and if they didn’t surrender, he would kill them if he could or die trying. He was just doing his job. If not for that voice he’d heard on the radio earlier, he wouldn’t care much which way it went, because until now, it seemed he had little else to lose. The final incident on the bridge had taken care of that, and the imagery of what he’d found there would be imprinted on his brain until the day he died.
Ten
THE BRIDGE WAS THE perfect kill zone—an eighteen-mile-long trap that was essentially a funnel at both ends with little hope of escape. It was the Interstate 10 crossing of the great swamp: officially called the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, but also known locally and through it’s own social media pages as the Long-Ass Swamp Bridge. “Long-ass bridge” was an appropriate description, to be sure. The parallel spans of concrete stretched on to the horizon, traversing a surreal and mysterious world of cypress, Spanish moss and blackwater swamp alive with cottonmouths and alligators. Once committed to the crossing, there were only two exits that presented an opportunity to get off or turn around, but just because they were there didn’t mean they were easy to reach. With some 25,000 vehicles per day crossing the bridge on an average day before all the trouble started, traffic even then could sometimes be backed up for hours by the frequent accidents that occurred on those narrow, shoulderless lanes.
Before the latest attack, the bridge had already been the scene of a deadly incident since the riots and violence began. That wasn’t surprising really, considering it’s proximity to Baton Rouge and New Orleans and the fact that I-10 was the major coast-to-coast traffic corridor across the Deep South. The first one involved a large group of ill-advised protesters who thought it would be a good idea to stand in the road as a human blockade near the midpoint, in that narrowest and most dangerous stretch where the eastbound and westbound lanes converged and crossed the main river channel. They apparently thought that impeding thousands of commercial trucks from making their deliveries would be a major victory against the capitalistic empire they despised and so desperately desired to bring down.
The clash that ensued was Keith’s first taste of the growing insurrection, although he’d been following the developments in other parts of the country through the news on television and the Internet. At that time it had seemed unlikely that such problems would arise in his rural jurisdiction, although the sheriff’s department in nearby East Baton Rouge Parish was certainly getting plenty of experience with both riots and terror attacks. Keith had no doubt that many of the four hundred or so protesters that got off the buses that brought them to the bridge that day were from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, reinforced by activists from other cities in the region as far away as Houston and Atlanta.
They’d seriously miscalculated in their expectations for such a campaign out here though. A rural stretch of highway in south Louisiana wasn’t the same as the city streets of Berkeley or Los Angeles. Some of the protesters came armed, perhaps having some inkling of this, but they weren’t prepared for drivers who refused to stop—or for truckers who stepped down out of their big rigs with their own weapons, unafraid of the consequences of using them. Keith didn’t know what started the actual shooting, because by the time he and his fellow deputies got there, it w
as mostly over. There were bodies strewn everywhere though, amid cars and trucks with shattered glass and bullet-riddled sheet metal. The black-clad protesters that remained alive were lined up against the bridge guardrails, held at gunpoint by Levis-wearing truckers and local residents alike; all of them lacking the patience for the kind of crap they’d been seeing on the news every night for weeks.
To reach that scene in the middle of 18-miles of traffic-packed bridge, Keith and the other deputies with him had used the Kawasaki dual-sport motorcycles and small ATVs the department kept for working the mud and gravel roads at the fringes of the basin. The bikes made it possible to split lanes through the gridlock, but by the time they arrived, it was too late to intervene. Still, they’d made hundreds of arrests on both sides of the battle lines, and the incident had closed down the bridge for two days while the scene was mopped and evidence collected. The anarchists had gotten what they wanted to an extent, but many of them got a lot more than they bargained for, as they didn’t live to see the results of their efforts.
At the time, it was the biggest shootout Keith had ever dealt with as a civilian law enforcement officer. He’d seen urban combat in Iraq, to be sure, but when he joined the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department after getting engaged to Lynn, he’d thought he was leaving all that far in the past, and the past was where it could stay, as far as Keith was concerned. He’d done his service to his country and felt it was enough. His brother Eric though, was different. Eric thrived on the adrenaline rush of combat and danger and couldn’t get enough of it. Keith had looked up to him when he was younger, wanting to be just like him right up until his big brother joined the Navy and completed the intense training to become a SEAL operator. Keith didn’t share his brother’s enthusiasm for the water though; so becoming a SEAL did not appeal to him. He’d joined the Marines instead, hoping to serve his time on dry land, and that’s what took him to Iraq. Two tours and losing three of his best friends was enough for Keith, but Eric just kept going, hiring himself out as a private security contractor after leaving the Navy. Keith rarely saw him in recent years, and had no idea where he might be now, especially since the collapse and breakdown of communications here at home. The last time he had seen him; Eric had been working mostly in Europe, where the kinds of things that were happening here had started even earlier. Paralyzed by sustained and constant terror attacks, several countries on that continent had unraveled into anarchy and finally, civil war. It made for lucrative opportunities for professionals of Eric’s caliber, but Keith wanted no part of it. Eric’s adventures had cost him his marriage, and caused him to miss out on most of his only daughter’s life. Keith didn’t look up to his big brother quite as much after seeing all that. How could a man give up so much at home to go and fight for strangers in places where he really had no business? Keith didn’t know, but he was pretty sure Eric wasn’t in it for the money alone.
Of course Keith knew that civilian law enforcement had its share of risks too, but being a deputy wasn’t the same as hiring out as a mercenary, and the odds were good that he’d come home to his wife at night. He carried a gun every day, but before that first incident on the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, Keith had fired his duty weapon only twice—once in a domestic dispute involving a drunken husband and once during a drug raid. Since then, of course, the shooting incidents were far too numerous to count, but more often they involved rifles and riot shotguns than his Glock 22. And like in Iraq, one-by-one, Keith had witnessed his close buddies fall. Law enforcement officers were targets of opportunity for the violent factions on both sides of the battle lines now, mainly because they represented authority and order in a world where those ideas became more hopeless every day.
In the beginning, the trouble was confined mostly to the cities. Keith’s department was called up several times to help out with the situation in Baton Rouge, parts of which quickly became an urban war zone like much of New Orleans and most other big population centers in the region. The local authorities were overwhelmed, and the state police and even the National Guard units deployed to help were spread thin because of the scope of the problem. All available law enforcement personnel were frequently needed in the hot spots, and that included rural sheriff’s department deputies, wildlife enforcement officers and even civilian volunteers. The riots had reached critical mass and as had happened in so many cities across the country, when the shooting started between the protestors and the counter-protesters, the escalation of violence exploded faster than anyone could have foreseen.
The hard-core anarchists quickly learned that such amateur tactics as blocking highways, burning cars and smashing windows would not achieve their aims. Congregating in the streets simply made them targets, and not just for the police, but for their enemies on the other side of the ideological divide as well. They still found it useful to encourage such activities among their supporters, stirring up racial issues and hatred of authority in the urban centers, but that alone wouldn’t bring the change they desired. The leaders among them and the agitators funding them knew they needed to shift to the kinds of tactics other insurgents around the globe had already proven effective. Coordinated terror attacks were a good start, and it was easy enough to borrow from the playbook already in use by the Islamic jihadists who had also ramped up their activities in the U.S. amid all the confusion and chaos. The targets of choice were law enforcement officers and anyone else who represented or protected the authority of the system they loathed. Regular citizens who supported the politicians and lawmakers were fair game as well though, especially those among them who vocally opposed what the insurrectionists were doing.
Keith had no idea what the people behind all this hoped to accomplish, other than some unachievable utopian dream in which everyone who agreed with them could participate in ridding themselves of all they perceived wrong in the world. It wasn’t a new concept, by any means, and Keith’s father had fought against it in the jungles of Vietnam long before Eric and Keith were even born. Bart Branson had said long ago, when the two brothers were nearly old enough for military service, that the world was bound to become less stable with time, and that if they signed up, chances were good they’d see their share of war too.
“There’s just too damned many people on the planet, that’s the problem,” their father had said. “There’s no way to avoid conflicts when you’ve got that many people and a limited amount of land and resources. Things are going to keep shifting and the boundaries are going to change. Hell, I hardly recognize this country now compared to when I was growing up. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when you boys are my age.”
Keith wasn’t as old as Bart had been when he used to say that, but things were indeed unimaginable now. He had hated that his father was 800 miles away in south Florida when it started, but it hadn’t done any good to tell him he ought to pack up and come stay with him and Lynn for a while. Bart Branson was as stubborn as they came, and he loved what he did for a living down there, running his little boatyard on the river in a place that winter rarely touched.
Keith had talked to him often in the beginning, before things got really bad and the cell and landline networks began going down. The occasional ham radio conversations came later, when that was all they had. They’d talked some about what was going on in Keith’s AO as well as in south Florida, a state that was reeling from violence as much as any in the country, especially in the bigger, more culturally diverse cities like Miami. Trouble had been brewing for years over the decisions some of those cities made to defy federal authority, and the illegal immigration issue was just one more fuse leading to the powder keg waiting to explode along racial, economic and political divides. When the burning and killing began, many such cities, including nearby New Orleans and Houston, soon found themselves in the dark. Shutting down the power grid of any major city was a simple matter due to the complexity of the systems they all relied on. The repercussions were far less predictable, however and of course the disruptions affected everyone, not ju
st those that such actions were intended to sanction. In the end, it only gave the insurrectionists more fuel to justify their increasingly aggressive counteractions, which in turn brought even harsher repercussions—creating a vicious cycle of ever-evolving chaos and escalating violence. The tactics and scale of the attacks changed until it could no longer be considered anything less than guerrilla warfare. Keith could still remember every word of the call for backup he’d responded to after one such revenge attack that involved his own department and forever changed law enforcement operations in his rural parish.
The sheriff and three deputies, arriving in two separate vehicles, had responded to a report of a shooting on an isolated levee road in the southern section of the parish. The female caller who reported the two burning vehicles in the road with dead bodies inside them had called from a cell phone with a local area code and prefix. She’d sounded appropriately frightened and upset, according to what the dispatcher said later, but the responding officers apparently drove right into a trap laid deliberately to kill them. They did indeed find the burning cars, smashed up in the middle of the narrow, two-lane road, but when they got out of their vehicles to investigate and called back in, the reported bodies were not visible in the flames. The next transmission anyone heard from them was a desperate plea for back up. Piecing together the evidence later, it was deduced that at least three shooters opened up on them from somewhere within the woods on either side of the road, because the four lawmen were found all dead on the scene, cut down by bullets from as many different calibers.
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